By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Dimitris Itoudis commented about his team’s misfortunes in the first half of the game and what went wrong up until the halftime mark: “I feel good because we took the first win, that was a good fight in the end. As you can see, we won the last three quarters. We had a very bad start. With all due respect to all our opponents, and of course to Khimki, which is a great and talented team, we gave up a lot of open looks and they scored a lot of threes – 14 three-pointers on the road. It’s a big number.”
As to what the Army team did to turn the tide of the game, Itoudis mentions: “We talked a lot in the locker room and also in the timeouts and the players deserve all the congratulations because they realized they have to rise to the moment, we need to rise to the occasion, and to take it from there and face obstacles that we face during the season and in certain games like what happened, we had to play unfortunately without Nando, without Kyle.”
De Colo went down with an injury around the 12-minute mark against Khimki and didn’t come back for the rest of the game. The Frenchman’s condition was not specified by the coach, though there are hopes of his return for Game 2 on Thursday.
“When you come as an underdog or a team that wants to surprise or upset is totally different than when you protect the home-court advantage and especially in the first game. It’s 1-0. We said from the beginning to all those that thought it was going to be a walk in the park, it’s not, it never will be”, Itoudis added.
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